If you want to learn Devanagri without too much blood sweat and tears, fear not! There are two ways to make your learning easier.
The first is watching music videos of various sort at DesiLassi, a site put together to showcase the next generation of Dr. Brij Kothari’s Same Language Subtitling approach to increasing literacy. If you’re the kind of person who knows all the words to the songs in the Bollyflicks you watch, you’ll be fluent in no time:
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The idea builds on people’s existing knowledge of lyrics, enabling early literates to anticipate the subtitles and read along; the inherent repetition in songs makes them an ideal vehicle for practice. The use of subtitling is a simple approach that leverages popular culture to encourage the sizeable population of India to read. [Link]
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They have some great examples of this approach being used with songs, trailers, promos and albums. Unfortunately, perhaps for copyright reasons, I can’t actually embed any of their actual Bollywood videos, so do click through.
If you use this approach, then Aishwarya can be your personal reading tutor, much as Morgan Freeman (in reruns) was mine, back in the day. Short of learning Hindi by smoking crack, it’s probably the best modern science will ever do.
The other approach uses your knowledge of English to teach you the Devanagri alphabet, like below [Thanks Blue!]:
The lessons start simply, teaching you to recognize characters from their context in English words, and get a good deal harder.
Related Posts: Mass literacy can be fun
I’ve been trying to learn Hindi for the past couple of months and found this site extremely helpful.
Ok, I totally read that as “Apples are Twesome” and “Where are all the old vixen”.
Yes, I know this says more about me than anything…
Cyrus, that is an awesome site. Thanks for the link.
Oh my god, ennis you are psychic. I am trying to learn Devanagari as we speak.
Here’s another way to learn Hindi via Bollywood.
The second approach totally fails if you don’t have a North American accent (at least on the example given).
True, I picked it to be silly because I liked the word “Awesome”. Most of the examples are consonants, not vowels.
Ennis knows all. Sees all. Is all. Either that or I read your blog.
Sweet. That means you all are catering to my every whim now? I better milk this… Sepia Destiny anyone?
à ¤…nbelievable. and maybe even à ¤…nreal.
à ¤â€â€Ãƒ ¥�à ¤°Ã ¥‡Ã ¤Ÿ! à ¤¨Ã ¤¾Ã ¤ˆÃ ¤¸ à ¤µÃ ¤¨ à ¤�à ¤¨Ã ¥�à ¤¨Ã ¤¿Ã ¤¸ à ¥¤
à ¤—à ¥�à ¤°à ¥‡à ¤Ÿ! à ¤¨à ¤¾à ¤ˆà ¤¸ à ¤µà ¤¨ à ¤�à ¤¨à ¥�à ¤¨à ¤¿à ¤¸ à ¥¤
Please delete my last 2 comments. The preview looks fine but the hindi fonts don’t show up in the actual post!
My dream has come true now if I can only nail them Bollywood dance steps.
For someone who knows how to speak in Hindi but can’t write, Google might help. Blogger now has Hindi support. All you do is type out your Hindi stuff in English and it automatically converts it into Devanagari. Of course, it’s more of a reason to not learn but for the ones really committed, it could help. The best part about it is that it actually tries to “read” what you have written and reproduces it in Devanagari – so that even if its not an actual Hindi/Marathi/Gujju/Sanskrit word, it converts it anyway.
More info here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/now-you-can-blog-in-hindi.html
Hey Ennis, I had the same funky tutor as well. I was watching old CTW clips last week with my nephew, singing Mahna Mahna.
Good timing, given the latest push for Hindi to be an official UN language.
The American accent in that must be really strong, because every time I read the ‘awesome’ as he’s written it, I want to pronounce it as aasome, not awesome. In fact most of his examples seem to have the awe mixed with the aa… how many people actually pronounce it aaxen, and not ox-en? It’s a nice attempt though… the whole accents thing is hard to deal with.
My first thought was, “Why didn’t I think of this first?” As probably the only person who learned how to read/write Devanagari before learning how to speak Hindi, the way I learned was by following along with printed song lyrics from geetmanjusha.com or other sites that use ITRANS (along with hours of copying each letter over and over, just like how we learned to write in grade school.)
The next best way to learn to read is to get stuck in Mumbai traffic and to practice by reading the decals on the trucks and autorickshaws. 😀
Anyway, I’m glad someone’s finally put this idea into production!
Hee! That’s great! Do most of you (those who were born or grew up outside desh) understand spoken Hindi/Urdu? This sounds like a good way to reinforce it.
Have any of you taken Hindi grammar lessons, though? Did you feel you needed them or was the listening/speaking component enough?
I know lots of folks whose parents were Arabic-speaking and who grew up outside the Arab world themselves but have decent spoken Arabic and then try to learn the “formal” language, and they do pretty well, though there’s always the problem of the disconnect between local dialects and MSA. My ex once tried to learn Hindi from some books that were hilarious, all “mata-shri” and “pita-shri” and with the sorts of situations and vocab that very few people probably grow up in (outside of, say, some parts of UP). I wonder if Hindi teaching has progressed in a more user-friendly direction. NDTV and other Hindi news channels are also great for more “realistic” Hindi these days (I’m pretty sure you can watch NDTV online), back in the day Doordarshan news was in such Sanskritised Hindi that it wasn’t very usable.
I wonder if Hindi teaching has progressed in a more user-friendly direction.
I took Hindi here in London for 3 semesters (woulda kept going if they hadn’t switched the class time, dammit) at an adult-education place. For the first two terms, we used a book called “Hindi Urdu Bol Chaal” which was produced by the BBC in the 80s (with accompanying videotapes) to teach people “Hindustani,” or what people actually speak. We moved to a different textbook in the 3rd term that was more frustrating for me. Plus it didn’t have any cool videos featuring British Asians with huge permed hair and shoulder pads. 😉 But yeah, at least some teachers are going for the less-formal model.
I was gonna link to that hysterical “Learn Hindi from Bollywood Movies” podcast too, but tamasha beat me. 🙂
In my experience, most Punjabi kids have at least a basic understanding (often due to the similarity between Punjabi and Hindi in the case of Sikhs, or because the parents actually speak a lot of Hindi in the case of Hindus) and many Gujju kids do too (due to being Bollywood fanatics). Surprisingly, I have met a lot of Sindhi 2nd genners who are reasonably fluent in Hindi as well – again, the Bollywood connection I think. The majority of Muslim (non-Bengali) 2nd gen desis seem to have a decent command over Hindi-Urdu. Again, this is all anecdotal. And there are plenty of 2nd gens who don’t seem to know much at all.
I bought a book a long time ago by Rupert Snell, it very beautifully goes over Hindi grammar, and I found it useful…as Amardeep alluded to in a post a long time ago, many 2nd gens do not get a good handle on grammar simply from hearing their languages at home, and a good book (available for Punjabi, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati) can really sort that out for you. I’m not sure if there are good books out there for learning southern Indian languages.
One more thing…I believe strongly in ‘colloquial’ versions of languages. In the case of Hindi, I like the version which is basically Hindustani, what ordinary people speak on a normal basis. The very high-flown, Sanskritised, artificial versions (which no one ever spoke in history) are just horrible, and the result of a tiny coterie of (mostly) brahmins in the 19th century who molded Hindi to suit their tastes and foisted it on the helpless populace (I say helpless because the literacy rate was abysmal, and few people were in a position to offer an alternative or express disagreement with the way the written language was going). There was a lot of politics involved too, as they tried to distance the language from Urdu. Muslim politicians and language scholars have been just as guilty, unnecessarily incorporating thousands of Persian and Arabic words into Urdu, at the expense of good desi words that everyone knows, and producing a language that you need a LOT of education in before you can understand it.
This sounds off-base. This was probably was the starting point of the language given the heavy influence of sanskrit – over time it changed away from this. The tyrant-overlord brahmins ruling over the hapless populace is an image that is sometimes used but there’s rarely any historical support for this.
As to the methods noted in the post the first one is great and the second one not so much. I could see you moving backwards as much as you do forwards with it. I could see one’s pronunciation ending up skewed.
Will “Kutte Kamine mein tera khoon pi jaoonga” be “Dog wine I your blood drink will”
wine=swine (typo)
That’s interesting, Amitabh. The few second gens I’ve known in the US have been able to understand Hindi well enough to follow movies but not speak it much. Isn’t it ironic that the Karan Johar NRI-type blockbusters all portray overseas desis speaking fluent Hindi 😉
As for the importance of spoken, everyday language, I agree completely. Except that it’s difficult to root out Arabic and Persian words because so many of them are so common in Hindi – the Hindustani I grew up speaking with North Indian family is about a quarter Arabic in vocab, as I realised later when studying arabic, and it’s nowhere near as Urdu-fied as some. For example, words like kursi, baad (as in “uske baad yeh hua”), mushkil, natija, lekin, maaloom, khaas, aam, tariqa, sawal, jawab, these are all shared with Arabic, and even a word as basic as “bacche” is shared with Persian. Rooting out these influences would be akin to rooting out French and Latin words from English at this point, they go almost as far back.
There was a good little book some years ago called Hindi Nationalism by one Alok Rai that traced the historical movement for the “restoration” of shuddh hindi and resistance to Urdu in North India.
SP, you’re right, colloquial Hindi is full of Perso-arabic loanwords in common, everyday use, and I think that’s fine…it’s the way the language developed and reflects the history of the region. I for one do not think those words should be rooted out of the language at all. And the French/latin analogy to English is 100% correct.
Looking at the use of the aah in these two words : Are – OK All – Not ok , especially when there exists a special notation in Devangari to elicit an “awww”
No more so than, say, everyone in The Sound of Music speaking English. 😉
Ennis! I’m supposed to be studying Immigration Law and International Trade and now i’m going to study Hindi… this is not good!
I remember some years back reading an article (monograph?) by Mahatma Gandhi talking about this issue of polarizing Hindustani in both directions for the sake of mapping a distinct language onto each of the two religions. [Of course he was against this.] I can’t remember and can’t find the reference at this moment, sorry.
Thanks to Ennis and commenters for all the learn-Hindi resources!
aasome! my non-indian groom-to-be will not be able to get out of it now. speaking isn’t enough! he must read and write hindi, recite tagore poems and cook chappatis… 😉
If you’re interested in learning a South Asian language over summer, check out the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s South Asian Summer Language Institute. It’s not too late to apply!